Simplifiying Semantic Web

As Tim Berner-Lee’s concept of the web was:

“My dream for the Web has two parts. In the first, I see the Web becoming a much more powerful means for collaboration among people. In the second, collaborations extend to computers. Machines become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the contents, links and transactions between people and computers”

The Semantic Web accomplishes this concept.

The Semantic Webs’ job is to make computer understand, find and integrate web pages that are understandable for human beings. This is possible because metadata is added to web pages which recognize and exploit relationships between items. These metadata are shared to various applications. Metadata is one of the pillars of semantic web. The other is Ontologies. Ontologies create similarities between items from different gatherings described with different vocabularies.

There are various semantic web projects that are working out well such as commerce and medicine. The Semantic Web is more effective in specific subject because there are more metadata that match to each other and the specific area users are more willing to improve to the metadata and develop ontologies.

The Semantic Web is not an application provider but it provides applications, it provides standards which are used to add applications through intelligent linking. The next step is to use Semantic Web for library web services.

Burke, M. (2009, March 6). The Semantic Web and the digital library. Aslib Proceedings New Information Perspective, pp. 316-322A.